1 According to the 1% sample census of November 2005, the transient population was then estimated at 146.35 million people. See www.ic.keio.ac.jp/en/download/jjwbgsp/2006/2_China.pdf (accessed 7 July 2008). For more extensive detail on the migrant population and the challenges of both enumerating and conceptualizing its many dimensions, see Chan, Kam Wing, “Introduction: population, migration and the Lewis turning point in China,” in Fang, Cai and Yang, Du (eds.), The China Population and Labor Yearbook, Vol. 1: Population and Labor (Leiden: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar. The focus in this article is on the translocal migrants who maintain a presence in both rural and urban milieu, together with their kin.

2 The relevant literature on rural–urban migration in contemporary China is extensive, including Lee, Ching Kwan, Gender and the South China Miracle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Davin, Delia, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (New York: St Martin's, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Entwistle, Barbara and Henderson, Gail (eds.), Re-drawing Boundaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Zhang, Li, Strangers in the City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Murphy, Rachel, How Migrant Labour Is Changing Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaetano, Arianne M. and Jacka, Tamara (eds.), On the Move (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodman, Bryna and Larson, Wendy (eds.), Gender in Motion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar; and Jacka, Tamara, Rural Women in Urban China (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 In this study I am using as my primary unit, “family,” as determined by the people with whom I spoke. In general, the term refers to whomever people saw as constituting their family. I use the term household more restrictively to refer to the officially registered household unit.

4 See, especially Croll, Elisabeth, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Croll, Elisabeth, “New peasant family forms in rural China,” Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1987), pp. 469–99CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Croll, Elisabeth, From Heaven to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Croll, Elisabeth and Ping, Huang, “Migration for and against agriculture in eight Chinese villages,” The China Quarterly, No. 147 (1997), pp. 128–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Croll, Elisabeth, Endangered Daughters (London, Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar; and Croll, Elisabeth J., “The intergenerational contract in the changing Asian family,” Oxford Development Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2006), pp. 473–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Huang, Philip C.C., The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

6 See Shue, Vivienne, The Reach of the State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Judd, Ellen R., Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

7 Also see Greenhalgh, Susan and Winckler, Edwin A., Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

8 On a comparative conceptualization of similar subsidies and their gendered character, see Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1951[1913])Google Scholar, and Mies, Maria, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed, 1986)Google Scholar.

9 For extensive detail on migration and household registration, see Kam Wing Chan, “Introduction.”

10 For further insight into these processes, see Luo, Renfu, Zhang, Liuxin, Huang, Jikun and Rozelle, Scott, “Elections, fiscal reform and public goods provision in rural China,” Journal of Comparative Economics, No. 35 (2007), pp. 583–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy, John James, “From the tax-for-fee reform to the abolition of agricultural taxes: the impact on township governments in north-west China,” The China Quarterly, No. 189 (2007), pp. 43–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Strauss, Julia C., “Forestry reform and the transformation of state capacity in fin-de-siècle China,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Pieke, Frank N., “Contours of an anthropology of the Chinese state: political structure, agency and economic development in rural China,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), No. 10 (2004), pp. 517–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, the author's fieldwork with Sichuan and Chongqing labour migrants in a large coastal city in late 2009 showed continuity with this pattern: an increase in the grain supplement was noted and the emergent localized rural health insurance (xinnonghe) was widely subscribed but still limited in effect.

11 Note that there were also considerable arrears in tax collection. The phasing out of taxes and levies resulted in an easing of the burden of rural residents, but tax resistance was high and much of this money was not being paid.

12 Determining who is actually in a rural community is methodologically complex. People often hold household registration other than at the place where they live or do not change their registration promptly, especially as a change will no longer result in changed land allocation. I have elicited data on who people consider to be in their family, who is registered in each household and who is actually present (or commuting) at the time of the household visit, as well as histories on work, mobility and changes in household registration. Each of these is relevant in different ways to considering who is part of a local community.

13 See Sargerson, Sally, “Introduction: women and policy and institutional change in rural China,” Journal of Contemporary China, No. 15 (2006), pp. 575–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Li, Yang and Yin-sheng, Xi, “Married women's rights to land in China's traditional farming areas,” Journal of Contemporary China, No. 15 (2006), pp. 621–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Judd, Ellen R., “No change for 30 years: the renewed question of women's land rights in rural China,” Development and Change, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2007), pp. 691–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 There are also cases of family members, especially the elderly, who do not have any local care, either because of a lack of family or because family members are unable or unwilling to provide care.

15 See n. 12.

16 Skinner, G. William, “Marketing and social structure in rural China,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, Nos. 1–3 (1964–65), pp. 3–44, 195–228, 363–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The connection between family and household in China might make the “family strategy” concept appear to resemble the quite different concept of “household strategy” in a highly productive model common in rapidly developing East Asian societies. The household strategy refers primarily to ways in which households can be considered as actors. See Bartlett, Peggy F., “Adaptive strategies in peasant agricultural production,” Annual Review of Anthropology, No. 9 (1980), pp. 545–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Niehoff, Justin D., “The villager as industrialist: ideologies of household manufacturing in rural Taiwan,” Modern China, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1987), pp. 278–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Despite a recorded cultural value on widows not remarrying, this was simply not an economic option for younger widows in any of these communities. Widows without adult sons were expected to remarry and commonly did so within a year. The default for child custody was that the children remain with their father's family, especially if male. An available alternative to the levirate was for the widow to bring a second husband into her family, if living separately, and there were cases of this in both Azalea Village and Li Home. This route can also be viewed as an additional option for bachelors and for divorced or widowed men.

19 After about ten years, old registration books are stored in the township and a new set created. Men (and women) who married out before the current books were created would not appear in the new ones.

20 There is some indication in these communities of women as well as men changing their household registration and permanently leaving the countryside through specialized secondary or higher education.

21 Such a marriage should normally result in the transfer of a woman's household registration to her husband's rural place of registration. Such transfers are not always timely at present, especially since there are fewer entitlements now tied to registration.

22 Judd, Ellen R., “Niangjia: Chinese woman and their natal families,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3 (1989), pp. 524–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 For an expanded treatment of these issues, see Judd, Ellen R., “‘Families we create’: women's kinship in rural China as spatialized practice,” in Brandtstädter, S. and Santos, G. (eds.), Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 29–47Google Scholar.

24 See Salaff, Janet W., “The emerging conjugal relationship in the People's Republic of China,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1973), pp. 705–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yan, Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

25 Both men and women are also losing spouses to illness at a rate that may be indicative of limited access to affordable health care.